Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday June 01, 2009 @11:26AM
from the time-to-exercise-the-rico-lawyers dept.

Techdirt has an amusing story about the expanding adoption of the RIAA-style business model of collecting settlement money from threats of litigation based on copyright infringement claims. This story comes with an amusing twist with the two cited companies, Davenport Lyons and ACS, being clearly related and ACS publishing an article with clearly plagiarized selections. Anything to make a buck I guess. "TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said."

Along that vein, having spoken with a number of lawyers, they all had admitted to 'borrowing' text from other agreements. One in particular took a fancy to Apple legal speak and regular used its legal copy, substituting its name for the company he was doing work. Why work for the hours you're billing? 1 min copy/paste/substitute, 100 hours playing golf to 'think' about what else to include.

From David Lyle, Acting Executive Director of ACS Law
To ACS Law Staff

Team,

I'd like to talk to all of you today about a very important issue that is right now affecting our public image. So serious that major news outlets may even pick up on it. It is in regards to our publications on copyright and as members of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, we need to look after each other. We have learned an important lesson today and we must share it with everyone so we can't make the same time wasting mistakes in the future.

That lesson, friends and coworkers, is that violating copyright is totally fucking awesome.

I mean we used to spend how many man-hours on one of these reports? 120? 240? Wasted wasted time. The information is out there just waiting to be copied. At first I thought this brilliant new technology would be expensive. I mean, how much do we spend just on the software that turns our computers on? Nope, just two simple commands: ctrl-c ctrl-p. These are the shake-n-bake methods of success.

That shit we did on Democracy and Voting? Yeah, take note. I just discovered that using this thing called Google will pull up page upon page of data that is as good as if not better than the crap we've been slaving over! Ever heard of a site called blackboxvoting.org? Fire up the goddamn presses. Frank LoMonte, that piece you did on the First Amendment was good. But Wikipedia's article is better. Next time save yourself the trouble, they're practically giving the stuff away out there--work smarter and faster people. Don't work harder.

And if any of you pansies come up to me like our now ex-employee Jenkins did about credit and citations, you'll be getting a citation yourself. You'll be fired. Now that's a citation. I just wrote a five hundred page report on the Second Amendment in five minutes, I don't have time for citations. Hell, you're lucky I don't fire the team that figured this out months ago and didn't tell us! I mean, we're a team people. We need to work together.

And if you're worried about the media, don't be. I've already bragged to them about this and told them they should pull their heads out of their asses and use it. Maybe that's why they're all dying business models? Ever think of that? This shit's free and they're paying for it. Morons. And the real icing on the cake is that since this hit the news, page views has tripled. It's fucking win/win no matter how you look at it.

I'll bet you think I'm a chump typing all this out when I could have just ctrl-c ctrl-p from The Onion and if you caught that, good for you. I'm still learning here, let's grow together.

"From David Lyle, Acting Executive Director of ACS Law
To ACS Law Staff

Team,

I'd like to talk to all of you today about a very important issue that is right now affecting our public image. So serious that major news outlets may even pick up on it. It is in regards to our publications on copyright and as members of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, we need to look after each other. We have learned an important lesson today and we must share it with everyone so we can't make the same time wasting mistakes in the future.

That lesson, friends and coworkers, is that violating copyright is totally fucking awesome.

I mean we used to spend how many man-hours on one of these reports? 120? 240? Wasted wasted time. The information is out there just waiting to be copied. At first I thought this brilliant new technology would be expensive. I mean, how much do we spend just on the software that turns our computers on? Nope, just two simple commands: ctrl-c ctrl-p. These are the shake-n-bake methods of success.

That shit we did on Democracy and Voting? Yeah, take note. I just discovered that using this thing called Google will pull up page upon page of data that is as good as if not better than the crap we've been slaving over! Ever heard of a site called blackboxvoting.org? Fire up the goddamn presses. Frank LoMonte, that piece you did on the First Amendment was good. But Wikipedia's article is better. Next time save yourself the trouble, they're practically giving the stuff away out there--work smarter and faster people. Don't work harder.

And if any of you pansies come up to me like our now ex-employee Jenkins did about credit and citations, you'll be getting a citation yourself. You'll be fired. Now that's a citation. I just wrote a five hundred page report on the Second Amendment in five minutes, I don't have time for citations. Hell, you're lucky I don't fire the team that figured this out months ago and didn't tell us! I mean, we're a team people. We need to work together.

And if you're worried about the media, don't be. I've already bragged to them about this and told them they should pull their heads out of their asses and use it. Maybe that's why they're all dying business models? Ever think of that? This shit's free and they're paying for it. Morons. And the real icing on the cake is that since this hit the news, page views has tripled. It's fucking win/win no matter how you look at it.

I'll bet you think I'm a chump typing all this out when I could have just ctrl-c ctrl-p from The Onion and if you caught that, good for you. I'm still learning here, let's grow together.

Your friend and boss,

David Lyle, Acting Executive Director of ACS Law"

All credit for this article goes to DeskLazer, who painstakingly used sources all over the internet to assemble this article.

I figured this to be occurring from a Wall Street company. But am surprised to see a British law firm. Of course, it sounds liek the old Shakespeare quote, "he doth protest too much." (I hope that isn't still copyrighted...)

I'm not sure how my comment is flamebait, but I suppose I should have checked out my source material better. I guess I'm just wiped from working on a bibliography (in MLA format) for my eight-year-old last night.

Is it me or does it seem like the idea of intellectual property is evolving? I guess all this legal round-about is simply the growing pains? To me it all just seems irrelevant (the situation, not the article). In the end we're just arguing over what to do with ourselves...kinda like debating in the mirror over which hand to service yourself with and this time each hand is wearing the other's glove?

I can't tell if that's an accurate analogy but it talks about servicing oneself so I guess that's funny.

Yeah, but did you all hear that TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all? Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said.

nies, Davenport Lyons and ACS, being clearly related and ACS publishing an article with clearly plagiarized smoney pleaseelections.by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the origin Anything to make a buck I guess.
"Torre